Denuvo will have to ramp up its fight against anti-piracy if it wants to stay uncontested, as one of the most popular game-cracking groups have made a statement that cracking the said digital rights management (DRM) will be easier.
In a statement issued to PC Games Network by the notorious game cracker Voksi, he stated that "[p]iracy scene groups have found a way to get past [Denuvo's] encryption and keygen files in just a day. They do not crack Denuvo, they simply keygen it, so Denuvo thinks nothing is wrong on the pirated version." This means that while the hackers have not exactly removed the DRM, they still found a way to bypass it, making games available to anyone for free.
This method relies on digital keys that Denuvo itself allows and sees as legitimate. The cracking groups have found a way to replicate the said keys, which were released on the first day of the game's launch. This is quite different from the traditional process of cracking. Before Denuvo was invented, crackers usually had to reverse engineer a game's executable file in order to bypass, delete, or emulate the DRM. This simpler keygen method was the piracy scene groups' response to the escalating challenge which Denuvo had presented.
This is unfortunate for the DRM company as more than a year ago, the same exact scene groups were having tremendous difficulty cracking Denuvo; some games even took more than a year to crack. This was one of the DRM's crowning achievements, as its initial purpose was to simply stave off any game cracking attempt for at least one month.
Now, however, the company is in trouble as new and big-budget AAA games are getting cracked immediately after release, particularly "Middle-Earth: Shadow of War," and "Total War Warhammer 2." Some developers have even opted to leave the DRM out of their releases since it has failed its purpose in some of the most recent games.
So far, Denuvo has not commented on Voksi's claims.
